I'm coming to the conclusion that community-owned and operated small clouds (co-ops) with easy onramps for self-hosting open source services like mail, storage, and VPN are the only way forward.
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I'm coming to the conclusion that community-owned and operated small clouds (co-ops) with easy onramps for self-hosting open source services like mail, storage, and VPN are the only way forward. Every corpo service is eventually going to make you ashamed to use it.
@mttaggart greedy bastards as far as the eye can see.
yeah your idea sounds like it would fit well into how things are already going. herd mentality is our doom.
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@ireneista @mttaggart @vfrmedia - so I think my take on this is more community first, tech second. Like, if the output is basically a support network and a set of tools to help individuals and community organisations self host, then I think I'd be quite happy with that.
Or maybe the solution is lower level services, e.g. shared server management with tools to make it easy for individual users to spin up their own Mastodon instance on their own domain.
VPNs are possibly a bit of a special case, and maybe the DEFCON folks reached the right conclusion there when they decided just to support Tor.
@philcowans @mttaggart @vfrmedia that's where we're at, as well
we went and read the linked thread, it does agree with our own conclusions both for generic infra and for VPNs
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@philcowans @mttaggart @vfrmedia that's where we're at, as well
we went and read the linked thread, it does agree with our own conclusions both for generic infra and for VPNs
@philcowans @mttaggart @vfrmedia but yes, your goals around community seem like the right ones to us, we just don't know how to do useful things with that
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@ireneista @mttaggart @vfrmedia - btw, there's this:
Which I think is the closest I've found. I also feel that https://toot.wales/ and https://join.cosocial.ca/ are somewhat similar in scope.
Tech-wise, there's https://coopcloud.tech/ - @coopcloud.
@philcowans @ireneista @mttaggart @coopcloud
things like that are definitely feasible, provided you set expectations to all users they aren't going to protect you from the NCA, so don't do anything on those networks that would attract them! (to be fair not /that/ difficult to do if folk are sensible)
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@philcowans @ireneista @vfrmedia Yeah my thinking was more shared infra and the ability to spin up services for oneself. But I also agree that this is something akin to the size of old key-sharing parties. It doesn't scale—intentionally.
@mttaggart @philcowans @vfrmedia it's not scale that we're concerned about. scale is not the blocker we are identifying.
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I'm coming to the conclusion that community-owned and operated small clouds (co-ops) with easy onramps for self-hosting open source services like mail, storage, and VPN are the only way forward. Every corpo service is eventually going to make you ashamed to use it.
@mttaggart Agreed.
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I'm coming to the conclusion that community-owned and operated small clouds (co-ops) with easy onramps for self-hosting open source services like mail, storage, and VPN are the only way forward. Every corpo service is eventually going to make you ashamed to use it.
@mttaggart I‘ve been pondering hosting coops as well, but there’s always the bus factor and what members want to spend money-wise for other people hosting their stuff.
You‘d have to pay rent for a datacenter, a bunch of used servers and some volunteers / part-time employees that take care of sysadmin things.
„trust other people’s homelab“ is not something I‘d do personally. People‘s lives change, and they might not be able to support this indefinitely.
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@decay That's why you need literal buy-in, yep.
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@mttaggart I‘ve been pondering hosting coops as well, but there’s always the bus factor and what members want to spend money-wise for other people hosting their stuff.
You‘d have to pay rent for a datacenter, a bunch of used servers and some volunteers / part-time employees that take care of sysadmin things.
„trust other people’s homelab“ is not something I‘d do personally. People‘s lives change, and they might not be able to support this indefinitely.
@falk_ That's true, but indefinite support may be an unreasonable expectation. A reasonable expectation may be an exit agreement.
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I'm coming to the conclusion that community-owned and operated small clouds (co-ops) with easy onramps for self-hosting open source services like mail, storage, and VPN are the only way forward. Every corpo service is eventually going to make you ashamed to use it.
@mttaggart I would love to see more of that, but there's a minimum size in practical terms, I think -- you have to be able to offer the equivalent of multiple AWS AZs, multiple long-term-stable exclusive IPv4 addresses, a properly HA DNS stack, etc
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@mttaggart I would love to see more of that, but there's a minimum size in practical terms, I think -- you have to be able to offer the equivalent of multiple AWS AZs, multiple long-term-stable exclusive IPv4 addresses, a properly HA DNS stack, etc
@delta_vee I don't think that's correct at all. You can be much smaller than that, at least to start.
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I'm coming to the conclusion that community-owned and operated small clouds (co-ops) with easy onramps for self-hosting open source services like mail, storage, and VPN are the only way forward. Every corpo service is eventually going to make you ashamed to use it.
@mttaggart I think it would have to follow the pirate radio model: anchor a ship in international waters, tap into subsea cables, 'adopt' some IP addresses, provide a top-level DNS server, ...
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I'm coming to the conclusion that community-owned and operated small clouds (co-ops) with easy onramps for self-hosting open source services like mail, storage, and VPN are the only way forward. Every corpo service is eventually going to make you ashamed to use it.
But then there’s the small problem of the global means of transmission (satcoms and telecoms).
Need redundant, independent amateur radio-like terrestrial data repeater stations.
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@brahms @mttaggart you can do more than you think with old desktop hardware and 16 gigs of DDR4 RAM. It is also much more energy efficient than server hardware (and much quieter too)
@ithoughtisawa2
An old desktop is a great place to start but if you're buying, don't rule out old servers. They're much better at thermal management very important if you're gonna stuff a few drives into it.They're surprisingly power efficient. And many of them are whisper quiet with the right config.
I'm running an old Dell T430 and all I hear is the hard drives. It's pulling about 70w with 6 hard drives in it (plus an SSD).
No GPU though.
@brahms @mttaggart -
I'm coming to the conclusion that community-owned and operated small clouds (co-ops) with easy onramps for self-hosting open source services like mail, storage, and VPN are the only way forward. Every corpo service is eventually going to make you ashamed to use it.
@mttaggart any examples?
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I'm coming to the conclusion that community-owned and operated small clouds (co-ops) with easy onramps for self-hosting open source services like mail, storage, and VPN are the only way forward. Every corpo service is eventually going to make you ashamed to use it.
@mttaggart A throwback to the 1990's/early 00's when you'd share a box running FreeBSD or Solaris colo-ed where we knew somebody and kick in what amounted to beer money.
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But then there’s the small problem of the global means of transmission (satcoms and telecoms).
Need redundant, independent amateur radio-like terrestrial data repeater stations.
@jumpingjackrussell Don't try to solve every problem at once.
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@falk_ That's true, but indefinite support may be an unreasonable expectation. A reasonable expectation may be an exit agreement.
@mttaggart Yes, you need some easy migration for the not so technically inclined. Because those are the ones that would use those services.
And you‘d need to standardize on absent of services to make migration viable. And of course you have to be at least as good as the „free“ services, so that a large number of people would use those services.
I‘m all for self-hosting but not everyone has the time or ability to run their own services. Just running your own mail service is complex enough.
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@philcowans @mttaggart @ireneista
I think the dilemma is accountability/liability - what happens when one of your users does something that results in cops/feds demanding user data (or even seizing an entire server?)
Here in England it seems possible to get nicked for harmless protests and now there's the paranoia about "keeping kids safe"
How many people with a good career and salary in tech are going to risk it for the sake of someone /elses/ freedom, if they aren't making money from the venture?
This could maybe limit involvement to folk who are retired with good savings and less to lose (its already happening with the demographics of protesters)
(that goes for all the current VPN and hosting companies too and is their Achilles Heel).
@vfrmedia @philcowans @mttaggart @ireneista Yeah there's UK #indymedia folks who remember the time the police seized their server.
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@mttaggart @vfrmedia @philcowans so just to get a little more pointed about it
when that happens, if you're operating as a corporation there are only three options:
- tell the marginalized people bye, can't help you
- attempt to defend them on the legal front
- shut down
corporations exist at the pleasure of the state. there is no fourth choice.
@ireneista @mttaggart @vfrmedia @philcowans not an expert but my thought is that "community hosting" (my thoughts are the neocities codeberg git.gay space) would need to coordinate with bulletproof hardened shit, and spaces subject to legal/copyright takedowns (bypass paywall extension on Russian git hosting, self-hosted Switch emulator forks) are an example of this spectrum
i did feel a lot of Nintendo fan projects were developed too openly with not enough opsec and bulletproof hosting, like they had no plans to keep Nintendo from finding the project, sending the C&D like countless times before, and finding their home address
i did wonder how homebrew estrogen managed to be hosted on the clearnet for so long
it *is* sad how most of the game piracy and libgen/scihub mirrors are scammy or CAPTCHA hell
